Posts Tagged ‘privilege’

When a caller asked about illegal immigrants under health care reform, Obama said the topic is one of many where misinformation has taken root. “This has been an example of just pure misinformation out there. None of the bills that have been voted on in Congress, and none of the proposals coming out of the White House propose giving coverage to illegal immigrants — none of them,” he said. “That has never been on the table; nobody has discussed it. So everybody who is listening out there, when you start hearing that somehow this is all designed to provide health insurance to illegal immigrants, that is simply not true and has never been the case.”

Roughly half of the 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. don’t have health insurance, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research group. Like others who can’t afford medical care, illegal immigrants tend to flock to hospital emergency rooms, which, under a 1986 law, can’t turn people away, even if they can’t pay. Emergency-room visits, where treatment costs are much higher than in clinics, jumped 32% nationally between 1996 and 2006, the latest data available.

Does the Democrats’ health care bill overturn this 1986 law? Does the Democrat’s health care bill specifically rule out illegal immigrants from qualifying for health care?

On Friday, Democrats moved one step closer to giving free health insurance to the nation’s estimated 12 million illegal aliens when they successfully defeated a Republican-backed amendment, offered by Rep. Dean Heller, R-Nev., that would have prevented illegal aliens from receiving government-subsidized health care under the proposed plan backed by House Democrats and President Barack Obama.

The House Ways and Means Committee nixed the Heller amendment by a 26-to-15 vote along straight party lines, and followed this action by passing the 1,018-page bill early Friday morning by a 23-to-18 margin, with three Democrats voting against the plan.

The Democratic plan will embrace Obama’s vision of bringing free government medical care to more than 45 million uninsured people in America – a significant portion of whom are illegal aliens.

If the Democrats have no intention of covering illegal immigrants in their health plan, why did every single Democrat vote against an amendment that would have prevented illegal immigrants from receiving government subsidized health care? I mean, if I had no intention of doing something, I wouldn’t have a problem voting for an amendment that makes sure the thing I don’t want anyway doesn’t happen. Is that just me?

These Democrats are worse than the worst caricatures of used car salesmen. They will promise you whatever the heck you want to hear; they just won’t put it in writing or stand behind it. They are the worse kind of liars. Don’t trust what they say when what they do directly contradicts what they say.

If Democrats want to claim that their bill won’t provide coverage to illegal immigrants, then demand they put it in writing, and codify it into law. Don’t just blithely trust these weasels, or the propagandist mainstream media that is out to justify liberalism and vilify conservatism.

This Census [Bureau] report says that within the borders of the United States as of 2007 there were 45.65 people without health insurance. But this number, according to the Census Bureau, included 9.73 million foreigners, leaving only 35.92 Americans who were uninsured.

President Barack Obama claimed during his Wednesday night press conference that there are 47 million Americans without health insurance.

A simple check with the U.S. Census Bureau would have told him otherwise.

Obama said: “This is not just about the 47 million Americans who have no health insurance.”

That assertion conflicts with data in the Census Bureau report “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2007.” The report was issued in August 2008 and contains the most up-to-date official data on the number of uninsured in the U.S.

The report discloses that there were 45.65 million people in the U.S. who did not have health insurance in 2007.

However, it also reveals that there were 9.73 million foreigners — foreign-born non-citizens who were in the country in 2007 — included in that number. So the number of uninsured Americans was actually 35.92 million.

And of those, “there were also 9.1 million people making more than $75,000 per year who did not choose to purchase health insurance,” CNSNews stated in a report based on the Census Bureau data.

That brings the number of Americans who lack health insurance presumably for financial reasons down less than 27 million.

The Census Bureau report also shows that the number of people without insurance actually went down in 2007 compared to the previous year — from 47 million to 45.65 million — while the number with insurance rose from 249.8 million to 253.4 million.

So I say tomato, you say tomahto. I say Obama is going to cover illegal immigrants, and Obama says he’s going to cover all Americans – and the fact that he considers illegal immigrants as “Americans” is completely beside the point. That’s the fine print, and who needs to waste time consider the fine print?

The point is that there is a massive disinformation campaign going on. Democrats and their mainline media propagandists baldly assert up one side and down the other that the bill doesn’t “give coverage to illegal immigrants.” And in the most rote, literalistic, never-mind-the-fine-print-just-sign-here mindset, it’s true: there isn’t a page that says, “We hereby grant illegal immigrants health care coverage because that’s just the kind of globalist-Marxist anti-American rat-bastards we are.”

But please don’t be so absolutely stupid that you don’t read the fine print.